Author Topic: Two traumatized snowflakes lean on each other and make it through  (Read 462 times)

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Offline Delmar

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Sat May 23, 2020, 03:45 PM
Star Member byronius (6,581 posts)

I had to listen to a truly Ignorant conversation at work on Friday.

Three reasonably intelligent women chatting on about the 'Hoax'. "All the numbers are inflated, all the deaths are for other reasons, the danger has already passed, the hospitals are empty, we should have a right to congregate and shop and not wear masks if we want to," blah blah blah.

These are not Trumpanzees. My boss is not a wise person, but is indeed technically skilled with a college degree. She's about to marry a man with four children (when she admits she hates children), and although she opposes Trump her fiancee is a right-wing libertarian with a PhD working in the medical device business who believes Covid 19 is a creation of the Chinese, so she kind of leans that way now. It's sad to watch her take this path.

My other two coworkers are both low-information, confused mothers of young children. Friday afternoon I was working hard while trying not to listen to the most bizarre display of superstitious ignorance I've been exposed to in awhile. It reminded me of people I heard in my childhood talking about blacks and women and gay people -- the wholly fact-free innocence of bookless, ahistorical nonsense.

They might as well have been three women from the 1300's blaming the bubonic plague on the Jews -- there was not a single bit of wisdom between them, and the confidence with which they spoke so openly in an ostensibly professional environment was the icing on the crap-cake.

After awhile I couldn't stand any more of the drivel being spewed across the cubicle wall, and so I put in my headphones and blazed away at the task before me. At the end of the afternoon, a coworker approached me and asked if we could walk out together.

He'd heard what I'd heard, and was as traumatized as I was by it. It made us both feel hopeless
, although it was just an anecdotal bit of life -- the polls say differently, and I think most Americans are becoming quite Woke. But it was shocking to hear it actually said out loud in person. There was no recourse to respond -- they were too deep into utter idiocy, and it would have driven them further in instead of helping enlighten in any way.

This happened just a few days after a former business associate of mine (a CEO from the Bronx) called me and told me he'd gone through Covid in March. He described the symptoms in gruesome detail -- fourteen days, during four of which he was certain he was going to die. The hospital told him to stay home, nothing to be done for him. His wife and children were asymptomatic, but he had a bleeding rash, a feeling of drowning, racking body aches and cramps that would not let go. He's permanently marked by the experience.

This is a man who ran five miles a day before he caught it -- now he can't make it to the end of the block without wheezing. His doctor says he won't fully recover for a year or more.

Darwin haunts this nation now. Information is the coin of survival. And those who possess the ability to critically think and study the science, and to act rationally and remain balanced in the chaos will have a much higher chance to emerge unscathed.

But those three women with children they are responsible for -- and all the other people who think this is so much media hype, overblown political rhetoric, baseless fear -- risk their lives and their children's lives, and to a certain extent, all of our lives.

The GOP's war on education for the past fifty years is going to kill more Americans than any other force in our history. It may be a difficult and seemingly intangible link to make, but it seems like plain fact to me -- purposefully spreading ignorance for power's sake has never been a long-term strategy for survival for any culture in human history.

Quite the opposite.
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Response to byronius (Original post)Sat May 23, 2020, 03:56 PM
Newest Reality (9,748 posts)
4. Denial

I think we get to see more of a common human coping mechanism emerge in times of crisis.

While sometimes ignorance, gullibility and other factors play into the mix, (we are usually painting with a broad brush for the sake of brevity) we know that people can try to displace what frightens them or do their best to resolve their own confirmation biases in order to just feel comfortable or stable.

The same kind of phenomena seems to apply to climate change and all of its implications. When the whole world, or ecosystem is at stake and the time frame for the ramifications and outcomes is increasingly short, some people are capable of looking at the facts and using their own coping mechanisms to deal with the distress and disturbance those facts bring them. They may end up, at the very least, more capable of dealing with the perturbations and crises better because they are aware and maybe more prepared.

Those who choose denial choose to enter a psychologically protective bubble, (though it may be what we call delusional or fantasy-prone) and there are various ways they create and reinforce that bubble, (beliefs, opinions, conspiracy theories, etc.). Now, one could say that the bubble of denial can be more comfortable and adaptive, but it could also be seen as a very weak, (as in soap bubble) method because the bubble can easily pop and the stark and vivid results of what is actually going on can be a very difficult and rude awakening which then can cause mental distress, breakdowns, destructive behavior, etc., or at the very least, would require a sufficient amount of time to sink in order to deal with and adapt to it.

Too long to read but the short version is that those that don't seem to be buying into the panic porn really do believe it but are in denial because the certain death of the coronavirus is too traumatizing to contemplate--people cope with the certain death of global warming with this denial also.

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Response to byronius (Original post)Sat May 23, 2020, 04:04 PM
Warpy (97,557 posts)
7. Whistling through the graveyard

is how a lot of people deal with threat, both real and imaginary. They're denying this because they can't see, smell, feel or taste it and minimizing it keeps panic down.

Anything that comes out of that festering lump of adipose tissue in the White House is deeply conforting to them.

This epidemic is still in the early stage. It will get worse. Pity them.
If the sickly old crone Warpy is still among us, the coronavirus can't be all that bad.

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Response to byronius (Original post)Sat May 23, 2020, 04:52 PM
Girard442 (4,372 posts)
20. Whenever I hear a story like this, I get the mad urge...

...to roleplay a convo that they would find insane. Make "plans" with complicit co-worker to recruit people into the Satanic Temple. Talk about how Soros is spreading big money around to foment insurrection and how coworker should get in on it.

It's mad. Would end badly. Still.
The primitive's first impulse is to counter with lies.

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Response to byronius (Original post)Sat May 23, 2020, 04:57 PM
louis-t (19,279 posts)
23. I hate to say this, but the only way some people will

wake up is to put videos of people suffering from this on the news. Every day. Show them gasping for air, show the rashes, show the faces of people wracked with pain. Meanwhile, as long a republicans insist on gathering in large groups without masks, maybe they will kill themselves off and not take too may of us with them.
That's what they've been doing.  That's why we're in this fix to begin with.

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Response to byronius (Original post)Sat May 23, 2020, 05:23 PM
niyad (68,429 posts)
26. "It really pisses me off that I am morally obligated to save your ignorant asses along with my

Own."

You probably cannot use this line in a workplace, but I have used it other places. They do take offense, for some reason.
Get yourself back into the safety of your shithole house and you won't have to worry about encounters with the deniers.
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Offline franksolich

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Re: Two traumatized snowflakes lean on each other and make it through
« Reply #1 on: May 23, 2020, 05:45:25 PM »
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They might as well have been three women from the 1300's blaming the bubonic plague on the Jews.....

Uh, how's this any different from the Democrats and primitives blaming all misfortune on the bad orange man?
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Offline jukin

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Re: Two traumatized snowflakes lean on each other and make it through
« Reply #2 on: May 24, 2020, 08:58:13 AM »
Cool story bro.

Meanwhile back in reality, survival rate from CCP CV19 in the USA is 99.971%.

If you take out the bungling democrat governors' states (responsible for 60% of CCP CV19 deaths) survival rate goes up to 99.989%.

The story the leftist media pushes that the Chinese Wuhan flu is the worst thing to ever happen is, in fact a HOAX. CCP CV19 is nothing more than a medium seasonal flu.
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When you are the beneficiary of a policy that steals from someone and gives it to you in return for your vote, it produces a sense of entitlement and dependency.